ePublisher PDF Creator

Note that his title was last updated in 2004. While some PDF specifications and practices have changed since then, most of the advice in this book are still valuable.

This whopping 100 page official supplement of the highly regarded ePublisher Guide is jammed packed with excellent advice and great product reviews. This book is designed to help you create professional looking products regardless of your budget. We cover layout on the cheap as well as several of the main stream commercial software packages. Tons of good sense advice to creating a readable as well as great looking product. Plus many product reviews.

With writing or contributions from several professional layout/design people:

A nice overview of what it takes to make a decent to good pdf...and how to avoid common mistakes. LIKED: It was straight forward and mentioned a few details about pdf production that I was unaware of... like how to do it on a short budget [...]

A must-have for anyone interested in entering the e-publishing arena. Good solid advice and pointers. Be forewarned though - if you're a publisher, you get this book (as well as the other two in the series) for free when you pay your RPGNow vendor set-up [...]

I got the E-Publishers guide last year and that's why I was looking forward to this one this year. I've read through it lightly and I wish I had gotten this book last year as it has given me information that I had to find out the hard way through experien [...]

These products were created by scanning an original printed edition. Most older books are in scanned image format because original digital layout files never existed or were no longer available from the publisher.

For PDF download editions, each page has been run through Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to attempt to decipher the printed text. The result of this OCR process is placed invisibly behind the picture of each scanned page, to allow for text searching. However, any text in a given book set on a graphical background or in handwritten fonts would most likely not be picked up by the OCR software, and is therefore not searchable. Also, a few larger books may be resampled to fit into the system, and may not have this searchable text background.

For printed books, we have performed high-resolution scans of an original hardcopy of the book. We essentially digitally re-master the book. Unfortunately, the resulting quality of these books is not as high. It's the problem of making a copy of a copy. The text is fine for reading, but illustration work starts to run dark, pixellating and/or losing shades of grey. Moiré patterns may develop in photos. We mark clearly which print titles come from scanned image books so that you can make an informed purchase decision about the quality of what you will receive.

Original electronic format

These ebooks were created from the original electronic layout files, and therefore are fully text searchable. Also, their file size tends to be smaller than scanned image books. Most newer books are in the original electronic format. Both download and print editions of such books should be high quality.